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A character in Murder on the Orient Express

Samuel Ratchett

The rich American with the soft voice and the evil face, travelling with a secretary and a valet and a stack of threatening letters.

What they want

To buy safety, as he once bought his way out of a jury's verdict.

The book

Murder on the Orient ExpressAgatha Christie, 1934

A snowbound train, a dead American with twelve stab wounds, and a carriage full of strangers who all have an alibi.

View the book

At a glance

In the book
The victim, compartment No. 2 in the Calais coach
Real name
Cassetti
Where he appears
Part One, and in every account afterwards

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Ratchett is sixty or seventy, well dressed and well served, and Poirot dislikes him on sight. He explains to Poirot that he has enemies and offers money for a bodyguard, and he takes the refusal calmly. He is seen alive at dinner and heard through his door in the night, saying in French that it was nothing, a mistake.

He is the book's victim and, once his real name is known, its first murderer. The Armstrong case is told in Part One, and from that chapter on the reader stops asking who killed him and starts asking who had the right to.

How Samuel Ratchett Is Portrayed

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • The facePoirot's phrase is that the face is benevolent and the eyes are not; a caged animal is the comparison he reaches for.
  • The staffA secretary, Hector MacQueen, and an English valet, Masterman, who together give him the look of a man with nothing to hide.
  • The lettersAnonymous threats he keeps in his compartment, which MacQueen has read and the reader is shown.
  • The voiceHeard once through the door in the night, speaking French, at a time that later turns out to be impossible.
  • The bodyTwelve wounds, some deep and some shallow, some from the left hand and some from the right.
  • The nameCassetti, the kidnapper of Daisy Armstrong, recovered from a scrap of burned paper.
Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

Ratchett was drugged with his own sleeping draught, and twelve members of the Armstrong household stabbed him one after another as he lay unconscious. The confusion of wounds was the point: no single blow could be traced to a single hand.

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